Modulation of financial deprivation on deception and its neural correlates

Abstract

Deception is a universal phenomenon in human society and plays an important role in everyday life. Previous studies have revealed that people might have an internalized moral norm of keeping honest and the deceptive behavior was reliably correlated with activation in executive brain regions of prefrontal cortices to over-ride intuitive honest responses. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, this study sought to investigate how financial position modulated the neural responses during deceptive decision. Twenty-one participants were scanned when they played a series of adapted Dictator Game with different partners after a ball-guess game. Specifically, participants gained or lost money in the ball-guess game, and had opportunities to get more financial gains through cheating in the following adapted Dictator Game. Behavioral results indicated that participants did not cheat to the full extent; instead they were more likely to lie after losing money compared with gaining money. At the neural level, weaker activities in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortices were observed when participants lied after losing money than gaining money. Together, our data indicated that, people really had an internalized norm of keeping honest, but it would be lenient when people feel financial deprivation. And suppressing the truthful response originating from moral norm of keeping honest was associated with increased level of activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortices, but this association became weaker when people were under financial deprivation.

Preference and strategy in proposer’s prosocial giving in the ultimatum game

“…Then, they showed that the increasing difference in giving between the two games was produced mostly by a rapid decrease in giving in the DG ( Fig 1B ), rather than the increase in the UG ( Fig 1A ), among those with the thicker DLPFC. Comparable results were also reported in other studies [ 27 , 39 ]. The second purpose of our study is to critically test the two predictions depicted in Fig 1A and 1B using the CRT as an alternative measure of cognitive control.…”

Distinct Patterns of Cognitive Conflict Dynamics in Promise Keepers and Promise Breakers

“…Similar results have been obtained in a related research field, i.e., deception/dishonest behavior. A consistent finding of studies in this field ( Priori et al, 2008 ; Greene and Paxton, 2010 ; Kireev et al, 2017 ; Sun et al, 2017 , for a review see Abe, 2011 ) is that the deceptive act goes along with increased activation of brain regions involved in conflict detection and resolution, as the ACC and DLPFC. Interestingly, some brain studies have also provided evidence for the opposite pattern (e.g., Zhu et al, 2014 ; Maréchal et al, 2017 ).…”

Collaborations and deceptions in strategic interactions revealed by hyperscanning fMRI

“…They need to override their default honest behavior, so the cognitive control networks are required to inhibit impulses for the purpose of profit. The study of Sun et al (2017) revealed that the cognitive and inhibition control regions showed greater activation for deception. On the other hand, the Will hypothesis suggested that people's nature is evil at birth, and their honest decisions are the result of resisting temptation.…”

“…Most of these regions are associated with executive control (Cui et al, 2014;Ito et al, 2012;Sun et al, 2017), inhibition control (Vartanian et al, 2013;Zhu et al, 2014), conflict monitoring (Yin et al, 2016), or emotion regulation (Suzuki, Misaki, Krueger, & Bodurka, 2015;Yin, Hu, Dynowski, Li, & Weber, 2017); (b) the Theory of Mind (ToM) (Premack & Woodruff, 2010) network also plays an important role in social deception, involving right temporal-parietal junction (rTPJ), the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) or precuneus (Schurz, Radua, Aichhorn, Richlan, & Perner, 2014). Among them, the rTPJ involves taking another person's perspective and moral reasoning (Saxe & Kanwisher, 2003;Saxe & Wexler, 2005), therefore commonly adopted as the seed base for advanced analyses; (c) the reward-related processing: such as the nucleus accumbens Figure 1: Selected hyperscanning neuroimaging papers that involve deception.…”

“…Besides paradigmatic and contextual differences, another layer of complexity that accompanied the relative scarcity of hyperscanning neuroimaging studies, is the relative limited methodologies adopted: most cited fMRI studies deployed univariate (e.g., general linear model or GLM) or region-of-analysis methods (e.g., Abe & Greene, 2014;Ito et al, 2012;Lisofsky, Kazzer, Heekeren, & Prehn, 2014;Sun et al, 2017;Vartanian et al, 2013;Wu, Loke, Xu, & Lee, 2011;Yin et al, 2016), with few recent exceptions utilizing connectivity (Jiang et al, 2015;Speer et al, 2020) and multivariate approaches (Jin et al, 2009;Yin & Weber, 2019). In comparison, in the present study, GLM contrast, psychophysiological interactions (PPI, O'Reilly, Woolrich, Behrens, Smith, & Johansen-Berg, 2012), and multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA, Kriegeskorte, Goebel, & Bandettini, 2006) were adopted to identify patterns of task-or seed-driven activity throughout the brain, plus the subsequent principal component analysis (PCA) that reduced the high-dimensionality problems in MVPA analysis, expanding the perspectives of data examination and joint constraints of the result interpretations.…”